There isn’t a whole lot to do in Okaukuejo after the day is finished but there are two options that we do every now and then. There is the Waterhole and the Waterhole. The Waterhole is the floodlit Okaukuejo waterhole on the edge of camp that tourists frequent to get up close to some pretty awesome sights. This waterhole is frequented by many a rhino, elephant, giraffe and lion, particularly at night. The Waterhole, otherwise known as the Lapa Bar, is where we locals head to most Friday nights. Or at least the Friday nights that I could find one or more people to celebrate the end of the week with me.  I tended to ignore the fact that I worked Saturdays and some Sundays, after all if I didn’t go to the bar on Fridays I’d forgot that it was actually the weekend.

Now I’ll start with the Waterhole, or the bar. Admittedly I went to the bar 10 or so times as often as I went to the actual waterhole (which I only went to about probably 3-4 times in the two years!). The bar is called the Lapa Bar thanks to the structure it is in - a lapa is the name given to open structures sporting reed thatched roofs held up by wooden poles. It might be called the Lapa Bar and we often say we are going to the Waterhole but I started to think of it as the pub with no beer. They only serve one beer on tap, Windhoek Draught, and it was becoming a habit to have none available. On the occasions that they hadn’t run out we would always enquire “Is the beer cold?” before ordering. Every time the answer came back “Ja ja, very cold. Very good, man”. Each time we were bitterly disappointed- when it was coolish we considered it a win. Why we kept asking I will never know. It think it became as much of a tradition as going to the bar at sunset on a Friday. We asked the question, Otto would tell us what we wanted to hear, we’d complain amongst ourselves and then we’d order another. To some extent I shouldn’t complain - the beer is only two Aussie dollars for a pint. Amazing. Still, the locals gripe about the price almost every trip to the bar. Apparently that’s tourist prices. I have suggested that if $2 is too much they better not come to Australia, or they should plan on it being a sober trip! My problem with the warm beer is that Namibian beer is horrible* (most Namibians come to Australia and say the only remotely good beer is VB, so you can see where their tastes lie). So the colder the beer is the more bearable it is.

 

*  Definitely a personal opinion, and one not held by Namibians!

The reason I begun to think of the Waterhole as the pub with no beer was because there were two weeks in a row of no beer on tap followed by a week with no drinkable beer. So we drank spirits that night. We must take partial blame for the beer-free week - during the previous week of no beer on tap we drunk the Windhoek Draught cans. Until we ran out of those. We then went to bottles of Taffel. Until they too ran out. Leaving only Castle beer which we wouldn’t touch - there is a less than PC saying among the Namibians that implies that Castle is what is produced by someone an hour or so after consuming Tafel.  By the time that only Castle remained, our barman Otto clearly couldn’t bear us anymore and called it a night. It was a long night. The best thing about it was that our 6+ hours stay at the bar which completely ran them out of all beer except Castle, still only managed to cost about $35 Aus per person.